Keynote Speaker Info
This year's Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde, from the Barrow Neurological Institute's Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience.
Dr. Martinez-Conde completed her PhD in Spain, followed by postdoctoral studies in the Harvard Medical School laboratory of Nobel Laureate David Hubel (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1981). Her research focuses on the neurobiology of visual awareness, perception, illusions and art and her work has been published in top academic journals as well as in popular science magazines, such as Scientific American. Dr. Martinez-Conde has given lectures to several arts organizations and museums. She has also been recently featured for her lab's research and contributions in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Discover Magazine, and Nature.
Dr. Martinez-Conde is interested in the aspects of the neural code that relate to our visual perception. One of the ways she addresses this is by correlating the eye movements that occur during visual fixation with the spike trains that they provoke in single neurons. Since visual images fade when eye movements are absent, it makes sense that the patterns of neural firing that correlate best with fixational eye movements are important to conveying the visibility of a stimulus. She has found that bursts of spikes are better related to fixational eye movements than singles spikes alone. This suggests that bursts of spikes are more reliable signals than are single spikes.
She will speak on the intersection of art and science in visual illusions and how artists have developed visual tricks to fool the eyes and entertain the mind.